PARIS — Nicolas
Sarkozy said Monday that if elected French president next year, he
would force Britain to welcome Calais asylum seekers on its soil
until their applications had been processed, as part of a tough new
package of proposals on immigration.

The conservative
former president, who is seeking his party’s nomination to run for
re-election, said he would not try to move the Franco-British border
to the U.K. side of the Channel as others in his party have promised
to do. But he pledged to travel to London the day after his election
with a demand to renegotiate the Touquet accords that regulate border
exchanges.

“The border of
France starts at the entrance to the tunnel,” Sarkozy told local
newspaper La Voix du Nord. “If there were no more controls on the
French side, that would create a considerable vacuum, with the result
of having even more migrants … Both sides would lose.”

“But,” he added,
“since most of these foreigners come to Calais on their way to
Britain, I want our British friends to handle the demands of those
who want asylum over there, at a closed center, in Britain, and send
back those who have been denied.”

Eternal Calais

Sarkozy’s call
came as a truck drivers furious over conditions at the port city of
Calais conducted a go-slow operation that snarled traffic. Starting
at 6:30 a.m. dozens of trucks and tractors converged in the area and
clogged the A16 highway heading to Calais, briefly choking off access
to one of Europe’s most heavily traded points of passage.

A convoy of farmers,
french businesses owners and locals blockade the main road into the
Port of Calais as they protest against The Jungle migrant camp on
September 5, 2016 in Calais, France | Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Drivers are
demanding that President François Hollande’s government shut down
a migrant camp known as the Jungle. Last Friday, Interior Minister
Bernard Cazeneuve visited the area and said he wanted the camp, where
thousands of migrants live in makeshift accommodation, to be
dismantled “as soon as possible.”

But Cazeneuve gave
no timetable for the dismantling. The camp’s southern portion was
shut down in March, and Cazeneuve vowed to speed up dismantling the
northern portion, while the state aims to create shelters for 5,000
asylum seekers and encourage others to leave France thanks to
incentives.

Such measures are
palliative and are unlikely to stop migrants from reaching Calais. In
the past 15 years, France has been largely powerless to stop the flow
of migrants to the city, a fact that few politicians know better than
Sarkozy himself.

In 2002, when he was
interior minister, Sarkozy ordered the shutdown of Sangatte, a
shelter near Calais that had been designed to welcome refugees from
Kosovo and was rapidly overwhelmed. The number of migrants in the
area dropped until 2005, when it started to climb again as migrants
gathered in a vast makeshift camp that became known as the Jungle.

Nicolas Sarkozy told
police in September 2015 that he had had no knowledge of such a
scheme

As president,
Sarkozy ordered the Jungle (not the same one that is at issue today)
destroyed in 2009. Again the number of migrants dropped briefly, only
to explode to close to 10,000 over the past two years as millions of
refugees fled from wars in the Middle East and Africa.

Asked if he agreed
with Cazeneuve’s pledge to shut down the Jungle yet again, Sarkozy
said: “Can we really talk about a desire by this minister when the
facts show the exact opposite? Socialists have been in power for four
and a half years. There were 900 migrants at Calais in 2012, now
there are more than 10,000. Where is the will?”

The Socialist
government has built temporary shelters welcoming a few hundred
migrants. But France has agreed to take in only about 30,000 migrants
and only those selected directly from refugee camps in Turkey, which
means little chance of winning asylum in France for those who have
already reached Calais.

Le Pen’s shadow

Given the difficulty
of treating the Calais problem locally, Sarkozy is proposing a
broader approach: stopping the migrants before they enter France. He
wants to re-establish border controls via a reform of the Schengen
free travel zone, which he calls “Schengen 2.”

“France’s duty
is to re-establish border controls, which is what we will do if there
is no ‘Schengen 2,'” he said.

In addition, Sarkozy
is proposing to scrap legislation that allows immigrants who have
obtained residency to apply to be “regrouped” with members of
their family. Barely relevant to the Calais situation, since few
actually seek asylum or residency in France, the family grouping is
an old bugbear of the far-right.

Sarkozy has also
proposed to change France’s birthright principle for citizenship to
make it hereditary — another idea borrowed from the National
Front’s toolkit.

Asked to respond to
criticism from Alain Juppé, whom polls currently show winning the
conservative primary and who argued that banning family grouping
would be “inhuman,” Sarkozy said: “What’s inhuman is to make
these poor people think they have a future in our country, when there
is no housing, no job and no financial means to welcome them.”